I'm Charity Nebbe.

And this is Greetings from Iowa.

Museums can teach us about the past and our present.

Everything in a museum has a story to tell.

They can share our heritage and they can provide insight into different cultures.

Iowa hosts a wide variety of museums, but each serve as a space for engagement and education.

On this episode, we'll head to Sioux City and visit an interactive museum that celebrates Iowa's history with the railroad.

Then we'll make our way to Clarinda to see how one couple converted an old Carnegie library into a stunning contemporary art museum and will visit the Museum of Natural History in Iowa City and learn about some of the special collections stored there.

For research.

Join me as we explore the incredible stories of our state.

It's all next on Greetings from Iowa.

Funding for Greetings from Iowa is provided by: with our Iowa roots and Midwestern values, Farmers Mutual.

Heil is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers just as we have for six generations.

Farmers Mutual Hail: America's crop insurance company the Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS.

Pella Windows and Doors Drives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow [music] August signals the start of school for thousands of kids across the state, with a certified enrollment of 97 students.

Diagonal Community School District is the smallest school district in Iowa.

The start of school may look a little different at diagonal I'm Larry McNutt.

I'm the K-12 School Principal here at Diagonal.

♪♪ (bell rings) Larry: We have 113 students in K-12 and then we also have a preschool on campus and also we have a daycare.

♪♪ Larry: Our ratio is pretty good.

In most classes it's about 7 or 8 students to every teacher.

Anna Newton: I'm Anna Newton and I'm a junior.

With the smaller class sizes, we know the teachers a little more.

We're a little - so, some of the teachers we know outside of school too.

You answer a lot more questions because there's less of you.

My parents graduated here.

I get a lot more one-on-one time with teachers.

It's kind of home.

Larry: A lot of it is our community.

They are very adamant that they want to keep a high school here.

So you see a lot of towns where they've lost their school, the town goes with it.

And our community wants to be a thriving community and they want their kids to go to school at Diagonal.

So that's really the big thing.

And we feel like our small numbers is very beneficial for the students in the classroom.

Our teachers can do a lot of hands-on activities with our kids where you get bigger schools and there's 30 kids in a class you can't do that.

So, the kids get a lot of individual attention they wouldn't necessarily get at a bigger school and we feel like that's a big benefit that we can offer.

Anna: Our community is very hands-on with each other.

So we know everyone, everyone knows you, whether you like it or not.

We are -- I feel like we're just really close knit as a - we're practically family around here.

Larry: I think we have a lot of small town small school pride.

Our staff really works together and I would say our students do the same.

We have very few discipline issues.

Our kids are really well-behaved and they want to do well in school and life.

And we're a small farming, rural community and everybody is willing to help each other out to be successful.

Anna: I like how close we are as a community.

You don't get to see that in a lot of other places.

I like - there's a whole bunch of role models over here that you see almost every day.

Larry: They always say it takes a village to be successful and that's really what we have here.

Everybody, if you need help with something there's always people there willing to help and I think that is really what makes us special.

(nature sounds & kids playing) Much of the growth of the United States happened because of the railroads.

Another example of the American inventive mind and business enterprise working to provide America with the greatest transportation system in the world.

If you could stop and think about in the late eighteen hundreds.

Really the only way you could travel was either by horse, buggy, wagon or the river.

That's what kept the country from developing faster, depending on riverboat few roads and canals.

These weren't enough.

It was just very limited in how travl.

Once the Transcontinental Railroad went in, it opened up a whole new frontier to be settled.

Iowa, you know, at one time was the fourth largest state in terms of railroad track mileage.

No one was no more than 12 miles away from a railroad.

That's how predominant railroads were in Iowa.

Are used for different purposes, like your smaller locomotive to be use in a rail yard somewhere, and they can use that to just move cars around or put trains together and or even like factories and stuff like that.

This site is very rare.

This is the only one that's being preserved, a steam railroad repair shop complex.

Like I've said before, it's not going to be glass and marble, well polished floors.

You're you're experiencing the site as it was for the worker, right down to the cobwebs.

It is just the enjoyment of seeing people leave this place with a better knowledge of the history and the education of this site.

We've had a lot of depots that have survived and they're being restored.

But there was a whole world or industry that existed within the railroad, the thousands who work together, who are bound together in one effort to serve the public with better freight and passenger transportation.

So it's very unique.

And the stories within these four walls these four corners is what makes us unparalleled elsewhere.

Sometimes I would just gaze around the station and wonder about the other stories.

What adventures might these people be on?

So when I heard stories about folks who were train-hoppers and got a job just by showing up in a town, I thought, why not?

I can never let go of the research because I find a st behind this place.

Don't tell me you're here to get in my way playing with that radio again.

I wanted to bring that to life.

The best part of the job was the people.

And we came up with the idea, let's do a living history, and create characters that take those elements that we were uncovering in the stories and tales and put them into a character.

So you let them know that P.B.

sent you.

Well, the storytellers are a unique and unusual way to communicate the story of the Milwaukee railroad in Sioux land and its impact on this community.

I tell people I am the eyes and ears of the train dispatcher.

So there are many jobs that are associated with the railroad.

And when I was approached to write the story, I got to thinking about, well, what jobs would I want to illustrate so that individuals who came out here would then better understand the railroad itself .

And then my challenge was to take what she had written and find props that would support those ideas in those different time periods.

And of course, that was a lot of fun.

I don't have time to constantly be going back and forth between that and the federal radio.

My character's name is Alex Brown, and she is a radio operator.

I am Louis Timmons, the telegraph operator from the 1940s.

So if you know anything about the railroad, you know that things must operate efficiently.

You have a great deal of flexibility.

I'm sure as the history books record this, it will in the millions.

My character is actually a real person.

It's P.B.

Miller, who was the accountant at the railroad.

And we're actually talking about an occurrence that really happened with the fire.

You can go around a museum and you can see the pictures and you can read all the little bios.

We clicked and the rest is history.

But by being an actual character, the people can engage with them, and it's a little easier, especially for children to relate to museum, as it were, with live characters.

And please enjoy the rest of your visit.

Stories are just really the stepping off point to helping us realize that these places were workplaces and they were people, places.

It is a railroad built by people and operated by people.

For the service of people.

Between 1892 and 1917 Over 100 communities in Iowa sought money from Andrew Carnegie to build public libraries.

While not all of these libraries are still in operation some have been repurposed and continue to serve as space for the community.

I think everyone should have art of some form in their home, in their town.

You go to a restaurant where there's a really good chef.

That's an art form on its own, I think.

Clarinda, it's our home.

Art is what we love.

So Clarinda and Art are together right here.

And I'm I'm thrilled that we've been able to do it.

It's a place for children.

It's a place for community members.

It's a place for gatherings.

It's a place for all people of all ages to discover contemporary art.

If you love art and you live in the Midwest, you just can't miss this.

It's just absolutely incredible.

CCAM opened in 2014.

We're in the old Clarinda Carnegie Library, which was built in 1907 and 1908.

I'm sure most people now, you know, Andrew Carnegie was a steel magnate.

And at the end of his life, he decided that the best thing he could do, I think, for his soul and for his family was to get rid of his wealth, as well as much as he could before he died.

And the quickest way he could come up with was to institute these libraries across America.

More than sixteen-hundred in the United States.

And I think there's four or five hundred outside the United States.

For him, a Scottish immigrant.

He could barely read, write when he was a child.

I think that was important to him to implement these more rural, underserved populations in the Midwest.

So he did that.

It was a huge gift to the country.

They all look similar in a way, but they're not in other ways.

They all have 13 steps up and 13 steps down.

He felt that reading should be free, but you should have to work for it just a little bit.

Andrew Carnegie started it all and you can see his picture is still up on the wall.

Well, it's my home, it's where I grew up, I always felt that I had one of the most wonderful childhoods that any child could have.

I'm an only child, but I walked to school every morning with my little dog, and I would ride my bicycle to this library.

I lived here constantly I was here every week.

When we found it.

It had been closed as a library for a number of years.

We bought the building and we said, what are we going to do with it?

That's the truth.

We bought a building, didn't know what to do with it, and it needed work.

You know, it was over a hundred years old, so we were going to have to spend money on it.

We've been collectors all of our lives, and so we're actually collecting art who is just an extension of our collecting gene.

And we both have it.

So we thought about it quite a while and finally decided because we're art collectors.

We have a lot of art.

But why not share it?

We decided that we would turn it into an art museum in Clarinda, mainly a contemporary art museum.

I love to watch people come through the door, especially people that grew up here.

I love it when they hit the front door because they open and I hear, oh, my gosh.

Because it's familiar, but it's new.

This was our place, this is where we went to hide.

It's where we went to grow.

It's where we went to get better.

It's exactly what it was before it was an art museum.

It was a library, it was where you went to learn more about the rest of the world.

And you could go to Spain, you could go to Belgium.

That's exactly what it is.

We have international shows.

Each one is a different theme, it rotates about every six months.

So you might come in and see a representation of New Zealand or India or Spain or Cuba.

It's a connection to people and the artists are people and their through their ideas and their expression and the whatever they're making or doing that's exposing people in Clarinda, Iowa, to those to those cultures and those places all around the world through their art.

We built it for the community, but it's really gone beyond that.

It's gone beyond this community to other communities, like I say, to travelers going cross-country.

You know, it's it's a destination in this part of the state.

So it was a huge a huge gift to our community, but it outstretched past that to connect Clarinda to the whole world.

And that's what we're truly trying to make.

Our mission for these years ahead is to let everybody feel what this feels like.

It's wonderful.

It's hard for me to describe it, but I can't tell you how much joy we have in some of this and finding some of this art and sharing with people.

But when we finished, we think it's the most wonderful thing that we've ever done.

This this is the best thing we've ever done.

Just I guess I guess the variety of it.

That every specimen is like a little time capsule.

So again, most of them are study skins not not made to look lifelike, but just to be studied in drawers like this by researchers.

I think it's important to know that these resources are here in a state university.

They belong to the state.

We have more mounted specimens here, they are in all of these cabinets in this row.

They're here for not only global researchers to access, but also Iowans.

For a small collection, You're right, it does have a lot of diversity.

And I love taking care of them and making sure that they are here for people to study and for people to see and for people to use for, I hope... Well, I'm not going to be here that long, but I hope that these objects are still here in hundreds of years.

So we refer to this area as the vault because of this gigantic vault door, and we've got some really special stuff back here.

We have about 136,000 objects and specimens.

All right, let's go over here.

And those are in the areas of cultural objects.

This is one of my favorites.

It's a bag that's made out of swans feet.

Ornithological specimens, so birds, nests, and eggs.

They are extinct, but they don't exist anywhere but in museum collections like this.

Insects.

These do not come from Iowa.

Mammals and also aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates like snails and clams and things.

Some of them are very old and used to be in jars like these old ones that we haven't been able to open and transfer the materials into newer jars.

So at one point back in the university's early history, the collections here formed the basis for some of the scientific education that went on here at the university.

The collections came from university led expeditions in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Frank Russell, for example, was one student who went to the Arctic and subarctic regions of western Canada and interacted with cultures there, brought back cultural objects, brought back the Musk oxen that you see on display in the mammal gallery here .

Brought back birds, even insects, just anything that he could find along the way and interacted with cultures and learned about the cultures that he that he saw there.

In this row, we've got our mammal collection.

So as director of research collections, it's my job to ensure the long term preservation of our collections.

We don't use chemicals in our collection anymore to deter pests, but we do set out these sticky traps, and I'm happy to report that this one is empty.

So because we have collections in such a wide array of areas, that means that I need to know how to take care of a lot of different kinds of materials.

So these are the goldfinches, and I pick up some things along the way about individual species or birds in general.

But for the most part, I know more about how to take care of things than about the life stories of the birds, for example.

I also teach museum object preservation to students here at the University in the Museum study certificate program.

So I go through each one and I section it out and blow dry with the blow dryer.

It's not just roadkill.

It's an educational tool.

I've used learning how to do this process.

I just I deal with so many different kinds of things, and I'm fortunate to be able to determine what I work on each day and what my priorities are.

So I just love the variety of it.

So when I was in high school, I would get a chocolate éclair from Barbara's bakeshop and bring it up here and eat it in the company of this moose family.

I can't explain why this was a good spot for me to come to brood.

I just felt I felt at home here with these serene animals.

You know, as I mentioned before, that every specimen is like a little time capsule that takes us back to a point in history and tells us a lot about what was happening in that in that area.

What was happening in that specimen, in that species.

And you can compare that to what's happening in the same area now or to the species in a different area now.

Because the university scientists, way back when, were very active in their expedition and exploration of our planet, they did bring these things back to Iowa.

And they are.., they're, they're Thanks for joining us as we explore the history and stories of our state.

we'll see you next time for another episode of Greetings from Iowa.

[music] Funding for Greetings from Iowa is provided by: with our Iowa roots and Midwestern values, Farmers Mutual.

Heil is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers just as we have for six generations.

Farmers Mutual Hail: America's crop insurance company the Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS.

Pella Windows and Doors Drives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow